Conduit Development (help needed)

[Vesa Pentti <vpentti mappi helsinki fi>]

Hello, 
 
I'm a member of a project group that is developing synchronization software for Gnome 
Pilot and MultiSync. (This is a University project.) The objective of our software is 
to be able to synchronize data between Palm Pilot and MultiSync, using Gnome Pilot. 
 
(For those who are interested in MultiSync: http://multisync.sourceforge.net/) 
 
It's clear that we need to develop a Gnome Pilot conduit as a part of our software. 
But what kind of conduit? It's peculiar to MultiSync (it seems) that we can't have 
access to the database that lies on the other side of MultiSync. Does that mean that 
our conduit can't be a SyncAbs conduit? At least it seems to be quite impossible to 
implement "for_each" signal or "match_record" signal when you can't directly access 
the database. 
 
We've been thinking about making a crude prototype version: we implement a custom 
conduit, which, every time synchronization is required, simply reads the entire Palm 
database and passes it on to a temporary data storage, from where the data is passed 
on to MultiSync. I suppose this is possible and should not be too difficult to 
implement. But is it sensible? 
 
In our case, CopyToPilot functionality is especially interesting. Implementing 
CopyToPilot without direct access to the other database seems problematic. 
 
All comments would be greatly appreciated. 
 
Regards, 
 
Vesa Pentti 
E-mail: vpentti cc helsinki fi 
University of Helsinki - Department of Computer Science